Category: admin

Regulars will have noticed two things. One, I haven’t been around much, and two, comments are gone.

Second one first. Comments here have, by and large, been a bit dull for a while. Some nice surprises sometimes, and some smart people, but also too often falling into the “I don’t really want this on my website” bucket. This isn’t going to fall into the slightly barbed mea culpa about switching comments off that the act seems to usually entail — no discussion of the “blogs are conversations” bullshit. Whenever I kill comments, I invariably decide to try again several months or a year or two later, and I’m sure that’ll happen again. But, right now, it’s time for them to go. (That time being usually indicated by my having to go into a comments thread, ask people to read what I actually wrote instead of what they think I wrote, and then explain the whole thing again in simpler language, very slowly and loudly, as if trying to direct a foreign tourist to the train station.)

The other thing: Lili’s cat’s dying, and I’m currently the only one in the house in a position to check on him regularly. Therefore I don’t have a lot of focus right now. I don’t think he’s got more than a couple of days in him, poor little bugger. We saved his life, sixteen years back, but I always thought that the damage done to him might have an effect on his life expectancy, and now he’s slowly winding down. I call him Lili’s cat because they became best friends when she became old enough to eat solid food. He’s always liked his food, and Lili went from “that small loud thing I avoid” to “that small loud thing who — hey, she’s offering me food. I like food. This small loud thing isn’t so bad.” And they’ve been inseparable ever since. So, yeah, the next week isn’t going to be fun, and there may not be a lot happening here, not least because I’m having to get up hourly to see to him, which I’m about to do right now. G’night.